ASRock 890GX Extreme3 Motherboard Review

Knowing ASrock as a company that usually pumps out zillions of colourfull entry level boards, sometimes innovating by integrating older technology like eg AGP slots onto new platforms, makes them stand out from the crowd. Sadly when you mention ASrock, most immediately are thinking about cheap hardware, correlating it with poor build quality and durability, lack of features... Well let me tell you this 890GX board is absolutely bullet proof. I had zero issues with it during weeks of bashing. It even survived several short LN2 sessions and a 5 hour marathon one at the AOCM OC party in Mindfeld!

Photoshoot the sequal

More Pictures :

Moving onto the rear panel. Like usual : 3 ways of connecting your monitor to the ATI 4290 IGP via either D-Sub, DVI-D and HDMI connections. ASrock still provides a PS2 connector (thank God for that) , a rear Clear Cmos switch is getting more and more common.

4 USB2.0 ports and a Firewire 1394 port. One eSATA2 connector. Just below the 1000Mb/s LAN port ( RJ45 type) there are two USB3.0 ports to hook up eg your fast external UDB3.0 drives. The NEC 720200 chip is implemented to deliver the USB3.0 power (also backwards compatible with older and slower devices).

The beefy designed heat pipe design is without many bells and whistles, but keeps everything pretty cool.

Another close up of the back panel. The 7.1 Channel audio card jacks are hooked up to a VIA VT2020 Audio chip. Also provided is an optical SPDIF out port

The heatsink made pretty good contact with the IGP die, strange enough there is no thermal pad for the PWMs

Three PCI-E 2.0 X16 slots are foreseen on the PCB. The the blue ones are for either single 16X operations, when using 2 cards it drops down to dual x8 mode. The lower white PCI-E 2.0 slot is 4X mode only. For the rest, ASrock put 3 PCI slots and a tiny PCI 2.0 X1 slot to fullfill all your needs for add on cards. USB connectivity is warranted by 4 extra headers on the bottom of the PCB

6 S-ATA3.0 6Gb/s connectors for maximum hard drive performance. On the left you can also see the Dbug LED. Which makes debugging childs play. These extras give a good idea this board is more than just another ASrock budget release. Don't worry about the tiny SouthBridge heatsink, it get's barely warm

Final details are the power and Reset buttons. Together with the CLRCmos button on the rear panel the ASrock seems like a benchers dream

Comment
from Gamer@ 2010/05/04

This isn't a budget motherboard anymore, seems like High end to me.

Great work LH, great to read.

Comment
from wutske@ 2010/05/04

At $150 it's indeed no budget bord anymore. Strange that Asus releases a board like this using a budget brand.

@Leeghoofd: there's no picture of the board in the review, only close ups

Comment
from jmke@ 2010/05/04

he uploaded it but didn't use it, here it is:

Quote:

At $150 it's indeed no budget bord anymore. Strange that Asus releases a board like this using a budget brand.

Thx for the comment guys ( my fan club ) it retails around 100-110 euro's , all the other 890GX board are at least 10% more expensive and some look cheaper...

This is a good solid board, I hope I can keep this sample for my 24/7 rig

Comment
from wutske@ 2010/05/04

$150 is about €115.
€115 is still very cheap considering what you get for it. If I would have needed an upgrade atm I'd have probably bought this board

Comment
from Massman@ 2010/05/04

Many people confuse Asrock with a budget brand, but in the last couple of months they've been focussing more on high-end, high-quality products. Okay, it's still no Asus, MSI or Gigabyte, but the potential is there.

Also note that a small company as Asrock tends to focus on the platforms that sell en masse. X58 may be the top of the performance segment, sales are not huge and for a small company it means loss instead of gain.

Comment
from wutske@ 2010/05/05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Massman

Many people confuse Asrock with a budget brand, but in the last couple of months they've been focussing more on high-end, high-quality products. Okay, it's still no Asus, MSI or Gigabyte, but the potential is there.

Also note that a small company as Asrock tends to focus on the platforms that sell en masse. X58 may be the top of the performance segment, sales are not huge and for a small company it means loss instead of gain.

Asrock started as Asus' budget brand, selling simplistic and cheap motherboards without all the extras. So it's no surprise people still see Asrock as a budget brand (tough boards like this can make a difference).